The Queen of parts

If you reject the possibility of headship of a church by a woman, how has it been possible for you to swear the Oath of Allegiance without your fingers crossed behind your back? Given that the Queen is the head of the Church of England, this must cause more problems than I have hitherto considered.

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5 Responses to “The Queen of parts”

At the risk of an ignorant layman correcting a bishop, when I read Wikipedia some months back, you don’t quite have it right.

The sovereign has not been head of the Church since Tudor times. The second settlement after the Catholic restoration specificially made the sovereign the ‘supreme governor’ instead of the ‘supreme head’ title of Henry VIII.

Surely no one equates the Queen’s ‘headship’ of the C of E with presbyteral headship. Her headship is constitutional, not sacerdotal, therefore one can pledge allegiance to her whatever one’s views of priestly headship in the church without a problem – I would have thought.

I’m not a tremendous John Knox fan, but he was canny enough, in the 16th Century, to realise that either male headship is a principle the Creator has written into everything (the sort of argument St Paul employs out of his culture about women cutting their hair, for example) or it is nothing. Thus he protested against Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I’s “Monstrous regiment.” I don’t agree with the gentleman, but it seems a bit mad to suggest God created the sexes to be in one sort of ontologically subordinate relationship in Church and not everywhere else. This would have seemed bonkers to old John Knox anyway… and his first blast of the trumpet is the original and best version of this argument.